“I think it’s my most… skillful film,” Stanley Kubrick stated in his calm, equanimous voice, the day after screening the first assembly of A Clockwork Orange.

We were standing on either side of Stanley’s desk in his functionally chaotic home office at Abbots Mead in Elstree, England, going over the agenda for our imminent meeting with Dick Lederer, senior vice president of advertising-publicity at Warner Bros.

40 years ago, director Stanley Kubrick was riding high following the back-to-back Oscar-nominated films Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey , but it would be his next movie that would really define the filmmaker’s career.